Autonomous driving is a long-standing problem in robotics, as discussed in Springer, “The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: The Great Robot Race,” 2005, “Special issue on the 2007 DARPA urban challenge, part I,” Journal of Field Robotics, 25(8):423-566, August 2008, and “Special issue on the 2007 DARPA urban challenge, part II,” Journal of Field Robotics, 25(8):423-566, August 2008.
Existing work in autonomous driving focuses either on highly structured environments, such as highways or city streets (see E D Dickmanns and A Zapp, “Autonomous high speed road vehicle guidance by computer vision. Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control,” 4:221-226, July 1987, S Tsugawa, N Watanabe, and H. Fujii, “Super smart vehicle system-Its concept and preliminary works,” Vehicle Navigation and Information Systems, 2:269-277, October 1991, C. Thorpe, T. Jochem, and D. Pomerleau, “Automated highway and the free agent demonstration,” In Robotics Research—International Symposium, volume 8, 1998, P. Varaiya, “Smart cars on smart roads: Problems of control,” IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 38(2), February 1993), or on unstructured off-road driving (see A. Kelly, “An intelligent predictive control approach to high speed cross country autonomous navigation problem,” 1995, Anthony (Tony) Stentz and Martial Hebert, “A complete navigation system for goal acquisition in unknown environments,” Proceedings 1995 IEEE/RSJ International Conference On Intelligent Robotic Systems (IROS '95), volume 1, pages 425-432, August 1995, O. Brock and O. Khatib, “High-speed navigation using the global dynamic window approach,” International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 1999, Sanjiv Singh, Reid Simmons, Trey Smith, Anthony (Tony) Stentz, Vandi Verma, Alex Yahja, and Kurt Schwehr, “Recent progress in local and global traversability for planetary rovers,” Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, April 2000, Springer, “The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge: The Great Robot Race,” 2005, Sascha Kolski, David Ferguson, Mario Bellino, and Roland Siegwart, “Autonomous driving in structured and unstructured environments,” IEEE intelligent Vehicles Symposium, 2006).
In structured environments, such as highways/roads, there is usually a topological graph (i.e., a lane-network graph) imposed on the environment, and the vehicle is constrained to drive on the graph with only small deviations admissible. In the case of unstructured driving, the robot is not constrained by a graph and is free to choose any path, subject to safety and kinodynamic constraints.